Shooglebox: helping remote working teams collaborate creatively

Shooglebox is helping teams find new and better ways to collaborate and share knowledge as many organisations continue to adopt home or hybrid working models having discovered unexpected benefits in the wake of Covid-19

Many businesses – including our own – have found apps like Zoom, Slack and Microsoft Teams have made home or hybrid working more efficient and productive in lots of ways.

But that efficiency can often be at the expense of the kind of serendipitous information discovery and spontaneous interaction that drives innovative thinking.

That’s where Shooglebox comes in. It gives your team a way to gather, explore and build on information in a way that helps you harness your collective curiosity, surprise each other and come up with better ideas and decisions.

At its simplest it's a way to:

Pool information quickly from different sources, saving information, links to web pages, social media posts, documents, photos, videos and more.

Review everything you're gathering in a highly visual at-a-glance grid view that helps you spot connections, surface insights and spark ideas.

Curate the things you've found and share with others or use as the basis for live video conference discussions, reports, presentations or other outputs.

Shooglebox is a great tool for individual use – but it really comes into its own when you use it collaboratively with others.

It helps with:

Shared research
Creative thinking
Design inspiration
Learning and discovery
Getting your heads round a topic
Separating fact from fiction

And most importantly: it’s fun to use together! The most creative teams we work with encourage their teams to find time to be playful and find ways to share and talk about diverse things unconnected to work and the tasks at hand.

Shooglebox is not one of those complicated tools that tries to do too much – it's designed to work alongside the tools and processes you already use. You can use it for just one short-burst project at a time or as an ongoing way to gather, review and share stuff.

One of the most powerful things about Shooglebox is the way it helps you visualise all the stuff you've often got sitting in different silos: bookmarks, multiple browser tabs, shared document folders, spreadsheets ...

Here are just some of the ways other teams are making use of Shooglebox:

Getting the benefit of different people's perspectives and brains to jointly assemble facts and insights at the start of a project or to get up to speed on a new topic or issue.

Forcing teams to recognise that curiosity – going beyond the quick Google search, the obvious answers, the same old ideas – is the prerequisite for true creativity.

Creating a shared "visual bookshelf" of research, knowledge and quotes to come back to again and again.

Being better prepared for Zoom meetings or brainstorms by assembling material in advance and pulling up a grid of cards to review and shuffle together, like a wall of Post It notes in a physical session.

Keeping track of people, brands or topics across different social networks and websites, pulling in posts from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, news sites to review together.

Building in downtime for non-work-related exploration – using Shooglebox as a shared space to squirrel away the useful or interesting things each team member comes across day to day and maintaining those moments of serendipity when you bump into something unexpected.

Get in touch here if you'd like to find out more about a team account, ask any questions or book a free demo. Our team can take you through some of the best ways to get started using Shooglebox as a team – and set up onboarding sessions on using Shooglebox alongside other tools when working remotely. We'd love to hear from you!